#83 INTERCHAPTER: MIDNIGHT THOUGHTS
Some more people I remembered – Sonny, Pete, and Javier – and a bit more on HSS and Olivia
Were you ever forced to read Moby Dick by Herman Melville and Melville had these sort of ‘interchapters’ where he talked all about whales because (not to be confused with the country of Wales, of course) he clearly didn’t want his research on whales to go amiss.
(I am just trying to be funny. Melville actually did work on a whaling ship, so write what you know and all!)
It was like a young boy telling you all he knew about constellations. Maybe Moby Dick is truly brilliant but I just felt it was very, very long (pot calling the kettle black with my chapters, right? The long bit, not the brilliant bit…) and the interchapters were these random asides in the middle of the story and I’m sure they were rife with symbolism but I do remember this one scene or chapter where they were handling this stuff (Vermicelli? Yes, I know that’s the pasta but it was many years ago now – spermaceti? Another word?) and it was sort of like wanking and a bit gross and messy.
Anyway, thoughts came to me and this is my interchapter.
Technically, these bits fit in the timeline when I was talking about High School Sweetheart (HSS) who was technically my third boyfriend in high school.
And we all need a bit of a break from Benoit, right? (Especially since I’ve written all but the last two short chapters on him now.)
HSS and Olivia
Remember I said Olivia and HSS got married and Olivia used to date Dorian (AKA the Stella Adler Academy Actor) who was a truly terrible boyfriend? Maybe dating truly terrible people was my penance for being truly awful to HSS.
HSS was loving, intelligent, handsome, and suffocating to me, but he did deserve love and I’m glad we lost our virginity together.
Through some good old Facebook stalking research, I came across something the other day.
I was looking for HSS’s friend from our uni days who we will call Sonny who is an internet ghost. You know how people you haven’t thought about in years, maybe decades sometimes pop in your head? That’s how it was.
I remember Sonny being handsome, sweet, and smart, a truly lovely soul, and during our uni days he was diagnosed with testicular cancer but he survived it. I remember asking him about it and him being scared and the whole ordeal was awful. Besides getting quite thin, though, through the treatment, he overall looked fairly healthy. I think he may have only been at VSU for a little while and then transferred to UGA or Georgia Tech or somewhere like that.
Back then, he was still a virgin which seemed to bother him. He was probably twenty or so. We hung out with him often but, despite being so handsome, he was very underconfident with women. I wonder what happened to him but whatever it is I hope it’s good things.
I took a gamble and emailed him. I figured he may never check the email but why not? Turns out Sonny did delete social media because he became a detective after getting his master’s degree and he now works in criminal intelligence. He worked on some high profile cases and had death threats, but otherwise he’s been happy and okay over the years – and cancer free.
Anyway, back to the thing I found.
I found a post where Olivia said she’d met HSS when he tutored her for maths, but this was around late 2010, long after HSS and I had broken up around 2008 but with lots of messy points until about 2009.
Years feel long when you’re in your early 20s anyway.
By this point, she’d gone from waitressing to entering university, which was good for her. I was definitely a snob about her back then out of jealousy. I told HSS that she wasn’t very pretty all because I was very jealous of her being the tall thin model-esque type of woman I’d always wanted to be. And she was actually pretty (not that that is a qualifier for love, mind you).
Being pretty or thin or whatever doesn’t matter does it? Even if she looked like a ghoul, the fact that she was a better partner to HSS was the key factor. He deserved that.
She wrote a post in 2017 and the vain part of me thinks it was to me (even though I’m FB friends with neither of them):
“To all women who let him go, thank you. Thank you for walking out of his life, for leaving him. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to LOVE him, do things that would make him happy and to really keep him.”
Split infinitive again. What do you guys feel about them?
Dr Elliott, my master’s thesis advisor, really had a bee in his bonnet about them and I still try to eliminate them as much as possible.
Also, as far as I know, HSS only had one other “serious” girlfriend and that was me but he did manage to sleep with a good number of very beautiful women (of course which fuelled my jealousy at the time) in an attempt to get back at me back then.
Olivia continued, “Thank you for hurting him. If not, he wouldn’t have learned something valuable. I will try my best not to cause him any pain, for it hurts me to see him hurt. I will do all the things you failed to do for him like be there for him when he feels alone, prioritize him, and not make him feel like he is just an option, listen to his stories, rants, and complaints, no matter how crazy or insane they might be.
Give him time and affection even when he is not asking for it. I will love him every second of every day and will not ever let him go to bed wondering if I still care. I will take care of the man you failed to appreciate. I will love the man you took for granted. I will do anything to keep him and make him want to stay. I will love him for all that he is and will support him in anything that he wants to be.
I will be the partner you failed to become for him. I will be the girl who will not ever make the same mistakes you did. I will NEVER let him go!”
Cute sentiment. And I think they’ve been together and married for over a decade. They have a daughter and seem truly happy and I am happy for him. Really, truly.
I think of the young man I grew up with back then and all the ways I unintentionally (and sometimes intentionally – re married professor and cheating) hurt him because of my insecurities and just the general hedonism of youth.
Pete, the Redneck charmer
Somehow the small jaunt down memory lane – and even though I’m writing about this it really wasn’t more than, say, half an hour – made me think of another confusing “something” I had with a friend. We’ll call him Peter.
Peter and I met at university. He lived in one of the upscale neighbourhoods in my uni town (not the one that Adam lived in – Adam’s was more upscale but a good one), which stereotypically did not seem to fit when he had decidedly redneck ways and manner of speaking.
He was a southerner through and through (Georgia, USA south not south as London south) but a kind, considerate, thoughtful human. He was handsome but shaggy in that his hair was always that sort of length that needed a cut and he often wore a bushy beard before that was fashionable.
He wore rugged clothes and liked hobbies like fishing and hunting. These were very much not my thing and not the aesthetic I wanted in a boyfriend because everything was about appearances, right?
Dr Scandi Lit Prof, Henry, would be the sort of highly educated equivalent of Pete but years later.
We met when I was dating HSS. We had freshman English 1101 (or 101 in some unis) together around 2006 and in 2008 he found me and messaged me on Facebook.
“Hello, my name is [Peter]. We had a class together with [teacher’s name] about two years ago and I think I recently saw you at Charley O’s and was thoroughly inebriated only remembering standing in line to get in and you walking by me smiling. I was wondering if you would like to hangout sometime? If not, I understand this whole internet socialisation thing is weird but I couldn’t find the words to approach you with the other night. Literally. I lost the ability to conjure meaningful thoughts, much less eloquent conversation. Sincerely, [Pete]”
He used “sincerely” – okay – and “literally” incorrectly.
I replied:
“Hi. I remember you. You actually did talk to me the other night. How have you been?”
We chatted and I found out he was majoring in physics and English – and I worked at the tutoring centre with his boss’s son, Rajiv, who was a mutual friend of ours.
We exchanged some messages and I must have written about having a broken car (the starter motor was gone) and he said his Dad owned a shop and he fixed it. In return, I said I was buying him dinner one Sunday in November. Due to our schedules, we didn’t actually go out until December or later that year.
I remember hanging out a few times, hearing Kesha’s “TikTok” song on the radio (like an actual radio) at his parents’ house. He took me to a posh restaurant once in town where I tried oysters with him. He took Hannah bowling and to the skating rink with me. We did all sorts of fun things but despite him semi-flirting with me in messages and telling me some photo or other “looked hot,” I could never fully tell what the deal was between us.
You see he had a girlfriend. I think they were probably on and off, but I knew she worked at Hooters and would win things like wet T-shirt contents and make hundreds of dollars in tips per night. She was working her way through law school. That old story. But it was true! Hah!
I think she was his childhood sweetheart. And I say they may have been on and off because we went out with her to bars sometimes, too. She was part of his friend circle and although we weren’t besties or anything and I don’t fully recall what – if anything – we ever talked about, she wasn’t unfriendly to me.
They recently got married and have a child now – and really they must have been together for around twenty years or so. I hope they’re happy.
There’s no particular moral of the story. I seemed to find myself in many of these ambiguous situations where I didn’t fully know if someone fancied me unless they sort of kissed me or we got up to something vaguely sexual.
Javier, the English major friend
The English department girls I was friends with (some frenemies with) and I were all friends with the very limited number of men in our English department. They were all handsome in their own way really but deemed by most of us as undateable because we had some other idea of what was “hot.”
Obviously, some people did date them.
One of them wrote a song for me once (he was also a musician) which was a very lovely gesture and that has never happened since. Don’t you just love how passionate people in their 20s are? Fancy someone? Here’s a song I wrote for you. Unfortunately, I didn’t reciprocate those feelings – as lovely as he was.
A different friend in that group was Javier. We all adored him. He had a Hispanic dad who wasn’t really involved in his life, which caused him considerable upset, and hadn’t grown up with many friends. He was also not very good with women despite, again, like Sonny being quite handsome. That nerdy, unconfident vibe puts people off, though, doesn’t it?
We all adored Javier and once our friend, Dr Kristy, helped organise a surprise birthday celebration for him. Here’s what I wrote in my journal about it back then (this was 2009 when I was 21):
Even though [Javier], a friend and colleague [by colleague we worked as tutors together on campus], had celebrated his birthday the last weekend in spring break when everyone was out of town, during that weekend I received a text message from my friend, Kristy, and another later from my friend, [Heather – of “the queen bee Heathers” written about here], informing me that a surprise birthday party was planned for [Javier] at Rodeo [this was a Mexican restaurant in our uni town] at 7.30 PM on Monday, 23 March.
I was asked to keep it a secret and to be on time. I’m sure the on time part was intended to be of emphasis to everyone who received the multi-recipient text message, but before I realized the message I read was indeed a mass delivered message, I chuckled to myself upon receiving it.
I am often late to events such as dinners and get-togethers—unintentionally so. I think my mother once told me that being late was a form of arrogance—arrogance in thinking that people will wait for you to arrive and that everything should revolve on your schedule.
To me, I’m not arrogant. At least, I don’t feel arrogant. I’m simply a frazzled person and am late simply as a matter of poor planning and unfortunate timing. I underestimate the amount of time it takes me to complete tasks, and, therefore, I am always rushing to and fro with inadequate time in which to complete my goal.
Though, in this [journal] entry I didn’t intend to discuss time management, but, instead, the temperament of my friend, [Javier]. He is an interesting character indeed!
I think I’m very long undiagnosed ADHD which I fight very hard against daily to combat since my day job is as an editor but if you find some of the 5,000 typos in my posts in my defense it’s very hard to self-edit.
Once he befriends you, [Javier] is an incredibly loyal friend. He is tall, lanky, has a sly smile, and dark, penetrating eyes. He has a rich almond skin colour since he is half Mexican—his father was Mexican.
In his everyday life, he puts on a front of being uncaring and nonchalant, almost at times reaching the arsehole status. But he wants everyone to think he isn’t as nice as he is.
He enjoys being the one to say that cutting remark that no one dares say. Then he laughs it off with a tone that is higher pitched than his usual one: “What! Everyone else was thinking it. No one was going to say it. I had to.” Then he shrugs. He likes to be blunt, matter of fact. He feels being honest is best even if it is painful to the recipient. He isn’t exactly cruel, but he is truthful.
Though to me, he is a little more toned down. I see through the gauzy exterior to the fact that he really does nice things for other people, but he prefers them not to notice and would rather he not receive credit for it. If you ever need someone to go shopping with, [Javier] is the person to call. He’s long-suffering; he’ll accompany his friends to any mundane task they ask unless, of course, he is busy.
He’s a deep thinker—he thinks more deeply than most. When he says the comments he makes he considers them. If he feels he was out of line, he’ll make a point to go and apologize to that person and tell them he was off base in saying what he did.
He constantly analyzes his actions and his speeches to see if they fit his own sense of his standards—is he being hypocritical? Is he being unfair to someone? Is he being the best person he can be? He thinks about everything with a view of self improvement in mind.
Surprisingly, unlike me who just rambles and rambles with rarely any eloquent, well-thought out, well-spoken remarks, everything [Javier] says is poignant and well-worded, especially in literature classes. With opinions, he formulates them slowly, ponders every angle in the mind, and only when his thinking process is complete does he speak.
Many of us speak in verbal waterfalls where the crashing waves of speech drown out our actual coherent thoughts, but not so with [Javier]. His thoughtful nature makes him a great writer, a dream he hopes to accomplish one day.
Hey, I hope Javier is writing and look at me attempting metaphors.
He once confided in me that as a younger child he didn’t have many friends and the friends he did have weren’t real friends; they often walked all over him. So, he became tougher, tried to care less.
[Javier] now works as a tutor with me at the Student Success Centre. He is good at his job, but more importantly, with this job he has made several friends and we all really care for him. I think at his birthday dinner, he finally realized how many people love him. He really is a wonderful, thoughtful person despite some of the fronts he puts up.
Earlier in the day, my friend, Darcy, who was actually planning to attend the surprise party asked me, “Hey, Elaine, what time are we going to dinner tonight?”
[Javier] was sitting near us. I opened my eyes wide, paused for a long time, and tried to convey the panicked no, no, no, no, no! You’ll ruin the surprise that was reeling through my head until I reasoned that Darcy’s asking what time we were going to dinner revealed nothing.
“Um, seven, I think. I’ll pick you up okay?”
***“I was mad that you didn’t ask me to dinner with you guys,” [Javier] said to me later that day. Any other day I would have invited him along.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I thought, why didn’t she ask me to go.”
“Well, you were going to ‘dinner’ with [Heather],” I chided, playing on the idea of the surprise plan in which [Heather] had simply asked [Javier] to go to dinner as usual to ensure that he would be free during the allotted time.
“But you still could have invited me.”
***When he walked into the room filled with twenty or so of his closest friends, he said in his characteristic tone, “Oh! Hell!” He didn’t know how to react, his hard, exterior shell was crumbling; he tried to remain stoic, but he couldn’t hide his smile.
On Facebook the next day he tagged us all in a note entitled: “Sappy Sentiments of a Tin Man.”
“I know I'm not very good at expressing myself, or putting myself out there, or wearing my heart on my sleeve, or any other sort of cliche, sappy, emotional tendency that comes with telling another human being how I feel. But it was a pleasant surprise (and I was surprised) to run into so many people last night for dinner.
Never in my wildest dreams (and certainly not three years ago) would I ever believe that the number of people who would give up their precious time to voluntarily see me would exceed the fingers on my hands. Never would I have considered myself capable or lucky enough to possess the friendship of so many great people.
So I mean it when I say thank you from the bottom of my heart, because I certainly don't have the guts to say it to anyone's face (it's just how I am). Again, I'm not good with expressing gratitude or anything emotional, but having such great friends brings warm, fuzzy feelings to my soul (or other adequate locations). Even though I do put up a rather asshole-ish front (which I'm sure no one takes seriously either way), I really do appreciate everyone's friendship. So thank you.
I've never been one to ask for anything (whether it's for a favor, a couple of bucks, or even an ear) because I've always expected the answer to be "no." But now, it's nice to think that maybe, just maybe, I'll get a few "yes"es in this era of my life.”
Why did I include Javier in a story about my love life? Well, Javier was famous for confessing his love for all of us. He once told me, Dr Kristy (who was engaged), and Heather that he fancied us – poor, Javier. I hope I let him down gently.
It wasn’t him really. It was this idea of people, this image, I was trying to live up to. And I’ve written about it before how sometimes when you’re searching for people to fit a checklist of career, looks, location, education, status, background, class, and so on, you fail to find the right fit (as in this post about the guy who reminded me of Patrick Bateman).
Coming up next, more chapters on Benoit, AKA the fourth person I met at Starbucks and my ex-husband: my solo road trip from Florida to Minnesota to Kentucky to Wisconsin, how I tried to get Benoit to reconcile, and the shocking secrets that were revealed.
New here or haven’t followed from the beginning, why don’t you catch up on the other eighty-two chapters I’ve written, including the one on why I’m writing these chapters in the first place – with the odd “present day snippet” of what is happening in my world lately. (Spoiler: things are much, much better.)
Did you ever have trouble defining “relationships” like I did? Or were you more direct with people? Or did you have a checklist you hoped potential dates would meet?
Great piece, Elaine. Love the witty stuff you toss in. (He hopes he isn’t accidentally ‘splitting any infinitives’ because he knows not what they are)
‘I didn’t fully know if someone fancied me unless they sort of kissed me or we got up to something vaguely sexual.’ Um how else are we supposed to know again?